Approach to Debt Widens Rift Among G.O.P. Senators

Senators Marco Rubio and John McCain last month, two Republicans at odds over how to deal with the federal debt.

Win Mcnamee / Getty Images

By JONATHAN WEISMAN

May 24, 2013

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans are locked in a widening internal dispute over future budget negotiations, splitting along generational and ideological lines on the party’s approach to the central issue that drove the conservative surge in the Obama era: how to deal with the federal debt.

In full view of C-Span cameras trained on the floor this week, Senators John McCain of Arizona and Susan Collins of Maine jousted with a new generation of conservatives — Marco Rubio of Florida, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky — over the party’s refusal to allow the Senate to open budget talks with the House despite Senate Republicans’ long call for Democrats to produce a budget.

It was the Old Guard versus the Tea Party, but with real ramifications, as Congress careens toward another debt limit and spending crisis this fall with seemingly no one at the steering wheel. The newer members say negotiations should go forward only with a binding precondition that a budget deal cannot raise the government’s statutory borrowing limit.

The Run-Up

The podcast that makes sense of the most delirious stretch of the 2016 campaign.

“I have tremendous respect for this institution,” Mr. Rubio said in an interview on Friday. “But I’m not all that interested in the way things have always been done around here.”

Republicans made the failure of Senate Democrats to pass a budget a central talking point in the 2012 campaign, going so far this year as to pass legislation withholding Congressional pay if budgets were not approved this spring. Now, some Republicans say the fact that members of their own party are standing in the way of a House-Senate conference committee undermines their fiscal message.

“This to me is an issue of integrity,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. “We’ve pressed for a budget. We ought to go to conference.”

But the budget hawks have not budged, and they have even taken aim at their party in strikingly critical language.

“Here is the dirty little secret about some of those on the right side of the aisle,” Mr. Cruz said of his fellow Republicans. “There are some who would very much like to cast a symbolic vote against raising the debt ceiling and nonetheless allow our friends on the left side of the aisle to raise the debt ceiling. That, to some Republicans, is the ideal outcome.”

Mr. McCain called the demands of his Republican colleagues “absolutely out of line and unprecedented.” The Senate passed the budget before dawn on March 23 after a grueling all-night session, he noted, saying it was time to try to reach a final deal with the House in a negotiating conference.

“Will this deliberative body, whether it is the greatest in the world or the worst in the world, go ahead and decide on this issue, so we can at least tell the American people we are going to do what we haven’t done for four years and what every family in America sooner or later has to do — and that is to have a budget?” he asked. Although few of Mr. McCain’s colleagues took to the floor to join him, many have expressed similar views.

Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the Republican leadership, said that at this point, resistance had to give.

“I suspect senators have held back long enough on the decision to go to conference,” he said.

Republicans who have made the deficit their central ideological focus are, in some sense, the dog that caught the bus. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated this month that the deficit for this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30, will fall to about $642 billion, or 4 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, less than half the 2011 deficit and about $200 billion lower than the agency had estimated three months ago.

The agency forecast that the deficit, which topped 10 percent of the gross domestic product in 2009, could shrink to as little as 2.1 percent of the G.D.P. by 2015, a level most analysts say would be easily sustainable over the long run.

And a conservative stamp is hitting the government, thanks to the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration. On Friday, 115,000 employees at the Internal Revenue Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Housing and Urban Development and the small Office of Management and Budget — 5 percent of the federal work force — stayed home on unpaid furlough.

House Republicans had envisioned a plan to reach a comprehensive deficit reduction deal predicated on a showdown in July over the debt ceiling. That showdown was supposed to drive both sides back to the bargaining table, but a rapidly falling deficit, rising tax payments and huge infusions of cash from the newly profitable, federally controlled home financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have scrambled those plans. Now, the debt ceiling may not have to be raised until October or November, in the next fiscal year.

Before then, unless a budget deal can be struck, Congress must pass bills to finance the government based on very different guidelines in the House- and Senate-passed plans. The House Appropriations Committee will have to draft a bill financing labor, health and education programs at $121.8 billion, a 19 percent cut from current levels even after the across-the-board cuts took effect. The bill to finance the Interior Department and Environmental Protection Agency cannot exceed $24.2 billion, down 15 percent from the current levels after the cuts.

“There is not a member of our committee, Republican or Democrat, who is happy with these numbers,” said Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for the committee.

The Senate has no intention of swallowing those cuts, so unless budget negotiators can meet and reach a deal, Congress will be headed back toward a crisis come Sept. 30, said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the Senate Budget Committee chairwoman.

“They could create crisis by having a government shutdown or holding everything back until November and threatening a debt default. That would be to their political detriment,” Ms. Murray said. “I think the American people have had it with that kind of hostage-taking.”

But Mr. Rubio said that he was not about to give in, and that a single senator might have the power to hold back negotiations indefinitely. “I’m not sure this is an issue I can ever change my opinion on,” he said.